Duke Ellington | Jazz Quotes Jazz Quotes Duke Ellington Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader. Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions. In the words of Bob Blumenthal of The Boston Globe “In the century since his birth, there has been no greater composer, American or otherwise, than Edward Kennedy Ellington.” # 19 Quotes By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with. ∞ I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did. ∞ Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom… In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country. ∞ There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

∞ I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. ∞ Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven’t; there’s no proof of it. ∞ Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing. ∞ If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good! ∞ Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one. ∞ Gray skies are just clouds passing over. ∞ The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen. ∞ What is music to you? What would you be without music? Music is everything. Nature is music (cicadas in the tropical night). The sea is music, the wind is music. The rain drumming on the roof and the storm raging in the sky are music. Music is the oldest entity. The scope of music is immense and infinite. It is the ‘esperanto’ of the world. ∞ It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz.

I feel there is no boundary line. ∞ I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again. ∞ A goal is a dream with a finish line. ∞ I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right. ∞ There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money! ∞ There is no art without intention. ∞ It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. ∞ The Stacks: The Funky Genius of Duke Ellington - The Daily Beast Michele and Tom Grimm /Alamy PEERLESS The Stacks: The Funky Genius of Duke Ellington He became so successful as a nightclub performer, as a songwriter, as a personality, that his serious musical efforts never got the attention they deserved. Ralph J. Gleason 03.20.16 4:00 AM ET You may not recognize Ralph J.

Gleason’s name but without him, Rolling Stone magazine might not ever have existed. When publisher Jann Wenner was a pup, he idolized Gleason, the longtime jazz critic in San Francisco who also appreciated the folk and rock scenes in a way most jazz writers did not (Gleason was also one of Lenny Bruce’s great champions). Gleason took the young enthusiast under his wing and later helped raise the seed money—and come up with the title—for Wenner’s start-up magazine about rock ’n’ roll culture. “Ralph was our eminence grise,” writes Wenner in the Foreword to Music in the Air , one of two sterling new collections of Gleason’s work published by Yale University Press due out this May. “He gave us credibility as well as contacts.” Gleason also wrote for the magazine during its nascent years, helping shape its sensibility with not just attitude but taste and authority. Take, for instance, this tribute to Duke Ellington—“Farewell to the Duke”—published shortly after Ellington’s death. It will give you a glimpse into Gleason’s huge talent, which deserves more recognition.

We hope it whets your appetite for more, in which case you must cop Music in the Air and Conversations in Jazz . Originally published in Rolling Stone, “Farewell to the Duke” is reprinted here with permission of Toby Gleason. Please enjoy one master paying tribute to another. —Alex Belth Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was three weeks and four days past his 75th birthday when he died last month in a New York City hospital. He had played his music in almost every part of the world except China and Siberia. He had dined with presidents and kings, had a Prince of Wales accompany him on drums, played piano duets with a U.S. president, performed his music on TV in Japan, Sweden, England and the U.S. He scored Broadway shows, did a ballet with Alvin Ailey, conducted symphonies in various countries, wrote for Toscanini and the Paris Symphony, scored films for Otto Preminger, and wrote special shows for TV. His series of Sacred Concerts—among his most important works by his own estimation—was presented in cathedrals from Coventry and London and Barcelona to New York and San Francisco.

He composed approximately 3000 original works, many of them portraits of leading black artists, members of his own orchestra, friends and lovers and many others, and tonal histories of black people in America. His accomplishments defy cataloging and his honors are so impressively diverse and extensive that they are almost bizarre. He received honorary degrees from at least 15 colleges and universities including Yale, Columbia, Brown, Harvard and Wisconsin. Nixon awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom (highest civilian award of the U.S.), Lyndon Johnson gave him the President’s Gold Medal, President Pompidou awarded him the Legion of Honor, and the city of Paris honored him with a special medal. Musicians’ organizations around the world gave him special awards. He was made a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1964 the Poultry and Egg National Board elected him a member of the National Good Egg Club, and two countries, Chad and Togo, have issued stamps in his honor. The list of prizes for him and his band (in magazine polls) comes to 77. Seven U.S.

states gave him special recognition and he won nine separate awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The April issue of Schwann Record & Tape Guide, the reference work to recorded music, lists 72 Ellington albums in a special Ellington section. But in the composer section immediately following, there is only one Ellington listing—of three of his longer works with the Cincinnati Symphony. Ironically, in 1965 the Pulitzer Prize committee, rather than give him a special award in music, decided instead not to give any award in that category. Ellington, in a typical mocking comment, said, “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.” Two members of the committee quit in protest. Something seems wrong here. America’s greatest composer, in the opinion of so many musicians, never got the acceptance his art deserved from American intellectuals. In 1965 Dwight MacDonald wrote a long article in the New York Review of Books on the White House party for the arts, in which he mourned the fact that American composers were not present along with the writers, painters, actors, and others.

Yet, in the same article, he said the best moments of the whole event were when Duke Ellington’s orchestra played the Ellington music. Obviously Ellington was not a composer in his eyes. Until the day he died, Duke Ellington’s appearances with that orchestra were governed by the American Federation of Musicians’ rules that apply, not to so-called classical concerts, but to dance bands and entertainment. Early in his remarkable career, Ellington knew he was more than a piano player, more than a songwriter and more than a bandleader. He knew he was a composer and an artist of the first rank, and the first time he took his orchestra into the studio in 1926 to record orchestrally, and not just as an accompaniment to singers or as a blues novelty group, he did two original compositions that stand as classics: “East St.

Louis Toodle-Oo” and “Birmingham Breakdown.” In the years that followed, Ellington recorded more than 300 times, putting on disc a history of pop music of the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties and Sixties—from funky down-home blues to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and his own symphonic compositions. One of the most consistent things about his original works was their reflection of the black culture from which he came. He celebrated life in the ghettos of New Orleans, Birmingham, Washington, and New York. These compositions evolved only in the past ten years into the extended religious works of his Sacred Concerts. And even there he incorporated adaptations or revisions of other ostensibly secular material. By the time Ellington went into the hospital early this year, the recognition black artists were achieving in other fields seemed somehow to be superfluous for him.

He had won all the polls, his popular songs—from “Mood Indigo” and “Sophisticated Lady” to “Satin Doll”—were standards in the catalogs of record companies and in the libraries of performers, and his own music stands on its own, as a body apart from the rest of American music, so individual as to be almost a protest. Nelson Algren once observed that “if society denies someone their reality, then they’ll structure their own reality.” That is precisely what Duke Ellington did. He knew what league he was really competing in (“Bach and myself both write with the individual performer in mind”), even when the critics and the impresarios and the managers denied it. After his first Carnegie Hall concert in the early Forties, one manager dismissed his extended compositions as valueless (as did some critics) and is supposed to have told him to get back to “nigger music.” He even had to fight at first to get his membership in ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Get The Beast In Your Inbox! Daily DigestStart and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.

Cheat SheetA speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't). By clicking "Subscribe," you agree to have read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Subscribe Thank You! You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason So Duke early on reached a decision. Let the symphonies and philharmonic orchestras be supported by civic organizations and foundations. He had to have his music played and since he wrote for a special group of virtuoso players he would pay for his own orchestra by writing pop songs and playing in nightclubs. He did it for decades. His musicians received the most expensive payroll in the popular music or symphonic fields. He wrote its songs that earned him a guaranteed six-figure income for years, and he toured night after night. His was the only band that always worked 52 weeks a year and never disbanded. Some of his people played with him long enough to have earned retirement pensions from General Motors. Harry Carney joined him in 1927 and was with him till the end.

Johnny Hodges, Ray Nance, Cootie Williams, Lawrence Brown, Russell Procope, and Jimmy Hamilton all spent upwards of 20 years playing the Ellington music. “I let them have all the money and I have the fun,” he once explained. He became so successful as a nightclub performer, as a songwriter, as a personality, that his serious musical efforts never got the attention they deserved. He mesmerized everybody with his elegance, his charm, and his melodies, and then went ahead and wrote important music behind that screen. He called it “skillapooping” and defined it as the art of “making what you’re doing better than what you’re supposed to be doing.” And so in nightclubs, he would introduce Johnny Hodges, the alto saxophonist, and, under the guise of having Hodges play some lacy, luxurious, bluesy melody, the band would proceed to perform a five- or 10-minute composition inspired by a Shakespeare play, a mountain in the Near East, a city in Japan or his memories of life in Harlem. Duke was addicted to his own music.

A prisoner of it, in truth, and some of his most casual efforts were so successful that audiences demanded them 20 years and more after Duke thought he had finished with them. The same was true of his musicians. Ten years after one member had left, people would still ask for them and critics would compare Duke’s immediate program with his early compositions and his current band with his original one. Duke was philosophical about it all: “This nostalgia for the gold days and our music is really a great compliment. To think that 25 years ago I had the good taste to select Barney Bigard, Juan Tizol, Wellman Braud, Harry Carney, and all the rest. I’m just a victim of my own good taste.” The problem with Ellington was that he was so much more than he seemed, so many things at once. He confessed that he never could resist a challenge and deplored his own drive to move on to different things.

Yet he was, beneath it all, always consistent in the quality of his music and no matter what bows he made to fad, from bossa nova to the twist, he was serious under the suave smile because, as he once said, “There has never been a serious musician who is as serious about his music as a serious jazz musician.” AF Archive/Alamy Stock Photo Duke lived well. He came from a family that lived well. He was never in want and never scuffled except for his first gig. In New York once, as he recalled, he and his band (then a small group) used to “split a hot dog five ways.” He traveled in the Thirties on his tours of the U.S. not on a bus, but in two railroad cars: “That was the way the president traveled.” The band lived and ate and loved and partied in those cars throughout the most prejudiced areas of the South.

In fact as Ellington once remarked when a TV reporter tried to trap him into putting down the civil rights movement, he had his own freedom march in the Thirties: “We went down in the South without federal troops.” The public saw Duke on TV or in concert or in the nightclubs as a man who dressed his speech in all sorts of verbal circumlocutions, who changed clothes two or three times during a show or concert, who eternally smiled and blew kisses at the audience and accepted their applause was his standard line, “We love you madly,” that he would sometimes deliver in a variety of foreign languages to accentuate his sophistication. But backstage Ellington could be as funky and down-home as any human being. I remember standing with him one afternoon in the wings at the Paramount Theater in San Francisco while his band played. Duke listened, his legs spread apart, gently rocking from side to side, chewing gum (Juicy Fruit) and hitching up his belt from time to time. In the band at that period were two saxophonists who were dedicated to achieving nirvana through chemicals. While a long trumpet solo was in progress, the two sat in their chairs, heads drooping, nodding on the job.

Duke shook his head and, out of the side of his mouth, said to me, “I don’t understand it at all. I’m a cunt man myself.” And so he was. Ellington’s nightclub engagements were especially notable for the appearance of ladies of all ages, colors, and conditions. And Duke treated them all like queens. When we were filming the documentary Love You Madly (nominated for an Emmy in 1967), Duke turned to the script girl the second night of the shooting. “Sweetie,” he said, “I don’t know your name. You must tell me right away because last night when I dreamed about you I could only call you ‘baby.’” She almost fainted. Another time I introduced a young woman to Duke saying, “She is in a class I’m teaching.” Duke took her by the hand, smiled, and said to both of us, “And have you told her I’m giving classes every night in my hotel suite?” Duke’s delicacy about romantic matters is legendary.

Once when he called to ask if I could make a hotel reservation for him, he added, almost as an afterthought, “and a separate room for the young lady who is traveling parallel to me.” In his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, Duke tells about the time at the White House when Nixon presented him with the presidential medal. Duke gave him double kisses on each cheek and he turned. “Four kisses?” the president asked. “Why four?” “One for each cheek,” Duke responded smoothly and Nixon said, “Oh.” I’ve seen that bit of choreography done with an aging society matron who then walked away dreamily after Duke’s answer only to stop suddenly, turn around and blush as she finally understood the implications. Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo Old lady friends, those on one-night stands or those who settled in for longer engagements, never forgot. One night at a San Francisco club, a tall older woman who looked like the ghost of an all-American beauty of 25 years before came up to him. She was wearing a mink coat that dripped money and was bejeweled like an oil baron’s wife. “Duke,” she said, “can you play ‘Birmingham Breakdown’?

For me?” He smiled and turned away. She tugged at his coat and added, “Don’t you remember? Miss so-and-so’s school in Dallas, in 1928?” Duke ignored her firmly, not because he didn’t remember but because she reminded him of how old he was. The lady finally turned and walked to the back of the club, stood there for a minute fuming and then took off her expensive Italian shoes and threw them, one of the time, across the room at him. Duke’s music was as much about love and about ladies as it was about black culture. He would play “Satin Doll” and announce that a “Satin Doll” was one “which was just as pretty inside as outside.” And “Passion Flower” he defined as “one better enjoyed than discussed.” He never made small talk out of a description of “Warm Valley,” another of his more romantic numbers, but then he didn’t have to. Especially if you listened. Duke himself was a listener. He claimed to be the best and said that listening was his pleasure.

He had to keep that huge payroll of the band growing (some got over $600 a week) because that was the only way he could hear his music played right after he wrote. Ellington was a facile composer who could write swiftly and on-demand. He spent large blocks of time in quiet solitude, either in airplanes or while driving from date to date with his baritone saxophonist, Harry Carney. He thought out his compositions carefully. Sometimes, he once told me, the most important things were thought out on the john. Then he wrote. Anything could inspire him. A pretty face, a sound in the city, the view of a mountain. During the times he was producing, Duke would frequently write all night long in his hotel room after the concert or the nightclub job. He trained himself to do this, sleeping during the day. He needed to be isolated for think time and those late night and early morning hours were when it was easiest to come by. At times his ability to write in quick bursts of creativity was astonishing. “Black and Tan Fantasy,” he once told me, was written in 1927 in New York “in a taxicab.

We used to stay in Mexico’s juice joint all night long and would usually be there until time to go to the recording date which was at 9 o’clock in the morning … And there I was with a number to write and so I wrote “Black and Tan Fantasy” in a taxicab on the way to the studio going down Central Park. And ‘Mood Indigo,’ I wrote it in New York in 15 minutes while I was waiting for my mother to finish cooking dinner. And ‘Solitude’ I wrote in 20 minutes in Chicago standing up against the glass office enclosure waiting for another band to finish recording. I wrote the whole thing standing up. ‘Sophisticated Lady’ is one of the things I struggled with for a month. In 1939 we did 32 one nighters in 30 days and I wrote a lot of things like ‘Jack The Bear.’” “I was the yearling,” Duke recalled, “and played less than anyone and I had the best job at Mexico’s on Broadway. We had some great sessions. There’d be The Lion (Willie “The Lion” Smith] and James P (James P.

Johnson ] to give the keys a dusting and I’d take a shot at it and Fats [Fats Waller] was there. He could play even then. There were some real jam sessions. “The Lion would put his cigar in his mouth and stomp over the piano and say, “Get up. I’ll show you how it’s supposed to be!” And he would. “If only we had tapes of those nights! And then there was the time Coleman Hawkins and Sidney Bechet tangled at the Candy Club. You should have heard that! “They used to have sessions every Wednesday night at Mexico’s. One week they would have the trumpet players, the next week they have the tenor players, the next week the trombones. I never will forget the night they had the tubas! “It was a little joint and you couldn’t get them all in it. They were backed up out into the street. There were four tubas on the curb waiting to get in and the tuba players inside were using pots and pans and plungers and anything they could lay their hands on to make that waa-waa effect!” Ellington chuckled at the memory. “And it was on the qui vive in those days. No gentlemanly give-and-take.

They meant business. We had a small band—six pieces—and we’d run up against some of those big bands and SonnyGreer would walk over to their drummer before the set and look them in the eye and glare and growl out, “I’m gonna cut you!” We scared ’em to death! “And then there was the night that King Oliver met up with Fletcher Henderson’s band. Oh, I wish we had a tape of that night!” “I wrote an entire show in one night,” Duke told me once. “It was called ‘Chocolate Kiddies,’ and though it never got to Broadway, it ran for two years in Berlin with Josephine Baker and Adelaide Hall. I got an advance of $500 for it.” Ellington once wrote a composition called “Harlem Air Shaft” (you can hear echoes of it in Paul Simon’s “The Boxer”) and he described it as straight programmatic music. “So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft. You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. Your intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbors laundry.

You hear the janitor’s dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee … An air shaft has got every contrast. You hear people praying, fighting, snoring. I tried to put all that in ‘Harlem Air Shaft.’” The reference to Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” is an illustration of how Ellington’s music floats around in the air and crops up the most unlikely places. Simon, for instance, says he doesn’t listen to jazz. The author of “Night Train” certainly did. He’s Jimmy Forrest, a tenor saxophone player who once spent a year or so working for Ellington. When he left, he took along a good memory of an Ellington composition called “Happy Go Lucky Local” (part of the Duke’s Deep South Suite, which was never recorded in full).

Ellington always claimed to have been flattered by the exact parallel of “Night Train” to the theme of “Happy Go Lucky Local.” There is a bit of Ellington’s “Night Creature” (written for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony) in Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and the Duke always claimed Count Basie’s “1 O’Clock Jump” was the child of a phrase he played in an early blues. “Moonglow,” the pop song of the Thirties that Steve Allen made into a hit in 1955 as “Theme From Picnic,” is easily recognizable as a reworking of Ellington’s “Lazy Rhapsody,” first recorded in 1932. And then, of course, contemporary blues fans who dig Junior Parker’s version of “Goin’ Down Slow” are probably unaware that the instrumental blues figure in the background is an exact reconstruction of Adelaide Hall’s wordless vocal on Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” (circa 1927). As far as I know Ellington never sued anyone for any borrowing of Ellington material. He professed to be flattered, and in a way he was.

There certainly has been no lack of direct Ellington influence, something short of plagiarism, in almost every era jazz has gone through since he first came on the scene. But in other ways, he could be very touchy about his prerogatives. He once lectured Dave Brubeck for allowing Dave’s sidemen to share his dressing room. “You’re a leader, a star,” he told Dave—and stars don’t share dressing rooms. And once when The Crescendo, a Hollywood nightclub, appeared to be giving top billing to comedian Mort Sahl, Ellington refused to enter the club until the proper order of billing was accomplished. Duke considered himself, at least in his show business personality, an equal with all the stars. And he certainly was. Duke was secure enough in this that he thought it funny when Hubert Humphrey stepped out of an elevator at the George V in Paris, looked at Duke and said, “Cab! Good to see you!”—thinking him to be bandleader Cab Calloway. Ellington, as Stanley Dance noted when he delivered the eulogy at Duke’s funeral, loved America. He was a patriot in a somewhat different sense from John Wayne.

Duke fought racism all his life and he spoke out plainly in his autobiography, saying it was basically an economic disease. “Our major problem,” Duke wrote, is “brainwashing of children and adults … [It] is the worst in the world …” There are educational institutions in the U.S. where we would still be barred from teaching because of opinions like that. Duke’s patriotism was not just based on his receipt of presidential honors. He felt this country had been good to him. When Franklin D. Roosevelt died, for instance, Ellington and his orchestra performed a singular service. While the presidential funeral train was traveling from Hot Springs to Hyde Park, the blue network (which was the predecessor to ABC) had Ellington on the air for hours, from the Radio City studios, playing a long program of his own compositions. Ellington was proud of the fact that his was really the only American music heard on the air that dreadful day. He had done the same thing once before under slightly different circumstances.

The night in the Thirties the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, Duke was broadcasting from a Chicago ballroom and the network kept the band on the air into the early morning hours so that the lines would be open for bulletins about the kidnapping. Sometimes the black press and his black audience thought he was less than outspoken in his support of the civil rights movement. Yet, as Duke told Nat Hentoff in 1965, “People who think that of me haven’t been listening to our music. For the past 25 years, social protest and pride in the history of the Negro have been the most significant themes in what we’ve done … We’ve been talking about what it is to be a Negro in this country for a long time.” All through his career, Duke’s compositions reflected this, from “A Night In Harlem” in 1926 and “Black Beauty” in 1928 (long before Black was beautiful) down to his more recent “Togo Brava Suite,” “Black Swan” and “Afrique.” And back in Harlem in the Twenties, Ellington was trying to get other bandleaders like Fletcher Henderson to call their music Negro music, not jazz.

Yet, as I said before, Duke had his earthy side. If you hung out with him for a while, you saw it when he met the night people, the black doormen, the taxicab drivers, and the street hustlers, each of whom had a word for him and many of whom he had known for years. They always dug him. He was a soft touch. Backstage, he could bring off his elegant ambience under the most trying of circumstances. I remember him one night after a concert in a grimy old fraternal hall, standing in an improvised dressing room, just a sheet hung on a clothesline between some posts. Duke was in his shorts, a bandanna wrapped around his head, and he sat at a card table greeting one after another of his friends and making the whole shoddy room seem regal. Another time in a similar dressing room at a nightclub, an old friend apologized for thrusting himself upon the Maestro when the latter was changing clothes. Duke smiled beatifically and said, “I only take my clothes off with the people I love.” Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy His humor could be sharp.

When several of his best men left in the early Fifties, he told me, “I’m just a young band leader starting out again. I’m not old enough to be historical and I’m too young to be biographical.” Once when a new trombone player, who had been drinking a little more than he could handle, stumbled and fell down just as he had been introduced to take a solo, Duke turned to the audience and said, “This is not a lull. It’s a dramatic pause.” Miles Davis has said, “Duke puts everybody on,” and there was the usual Milesian truth to the statement. When I made the pilot TV show for the educational TV series Jazz Casual, Ellington was the guest artist. We were all set and waiting for a 5 o’clock taping. Came 4:45 and no Duke. Came 4:55 and no Duke, and then he walked in. The crew was in a panic. I was sweating like a grand jury witness. I went over to the maestro and said, “Now Duke, the usual formula is ….” Duke smiled benignly at me and said, “Anybody can do it with a format, sweetie.

The trick is to do it without one. Now I’ll sit at the piano and start to play and you walk on and ask me what the tune is and we’ll go from there.” I said “OK,” weakly, did what I was told to do and we had a half hour of Ellington and Billy Strayhorn piano duets with the maestro talking up a storm about his music. Duke could be perverse, too, to put it mildly. When he first appeared at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the same summer he had made a tremendous hit with a long up-tempo number at the Newport Jazz Festival called “Newport Up,” Duke asked Jimmy Lyons, the manager of the festival, what he should play. “Anything you want to, Duke,” Lyons replied, “except that number about the other festival.” So Ellington opened his show with “Newport Up.” Ellington was a piano player and a great one, but his true instrument was his orchestra. One of his greatest abilities was his gift for creating tension with subtle rather than raucous sounds, as his son Mercer has noted.

And he wrote, like Bach, for the performer, his performers, which is one of the reasons his scores are not published since they changed from player to player. “It’s not the notes that are important,” Duke said, “it’s who they are written for. Before you can play anything or write anything, you must hear it. Some of the prettiest things on paper come off very drab. So you hear, you imagine, you see a note on a piece of paper and you hear it played in the tone personality of a particular musician. “For instance, here’s a guy who uses a mute, and he finds he can get only seven good notes out of it. The problem is to use those seven. Personalized writing is very important. If I didn’t know who I was writing for, I don’t know what I’d do. When we first did ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’ we found there was a mike tone created by using two horns close to the mike. The problem then, when we did ‘Mood Indigo’ later, was to use that mike tone! “I always consider my problems opportunities to do something. Like Jimmy Valentine or Houdini. Necessity, in other words, is the mother!

But I couldn’t work without a deadline. If I retired to some luxurious home by the sea, you know what I’d write? Nuthin’!” And so Ellington spent his life on the road with his own self-financed orchestra, writing his music in hotel rooms, taxicabs, and airplanes, making the final decisions in the john and hearing it played within hours by the collection of virtuoso musicians he paid so handsomely. Duke thought he was a lucky man to have that pleasure. Money was incidental. “I have to get a bang out of it, not just the money. I’m not worried about writing for posterity. I just want it to sound good right now.” The weekend Duke died, I watched the TV news shows from the funeral parlor and the church with all those thousands who came from all over to mourn him (singer Alice Babs flew in from Spain), and I could not cry for Duke. He was out there living every minute like a teenager right up to the last few months. He had been everywhere, seen everything, knew everybody, and all his adult life he had the one thing he wanted most—his orchestra (“an expensive toy”) to play his music. And what music!

As the French poet Blaise Cendrars said, “Such music is not only a new art form, but a new reason for living.” I am honored to have known him. His music gave me countless hours of pleasure throughout my life and I expect it will continue to do so. And it was not just pleasure, it was inspiration. Duke’s mystery was inspiring. He made you want to know. As André Previn remarked one night after we’d seen Duke’s band, “You know, Stan Kenton can stand in front of 1,000 fiddles and 1,000 brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s done like this.’ But Duke merely lifts his little finger, three horns make a sound and I don’t know what it is!” Previn’s statement, really, says more than a Pulitzer prize ever could. Duke was a musician’s musician and a composer’s composer. And one incredible man. Four kisses. One for each cheek. READ THIS LIST Edward K.

"Duke" Ellington, African American Composer & Pianist Sony 61444 (2000) November 1968 performance of Duke Ellington's Sacred Concert at Chicago's Auditorium Theater. Photo from Barbara Wright-Pryor, who says: "I was Duke's choral director and am seated in the first row, fifth from right.ï¿½ 1 Birth Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an African American composer, pianist and jazz band leader. He was born into a middle-class family in Washington, D.C. on April 29, 1899. James Clyde Sellman writes in Africana Encyclopedia: For nearly half a century Duke Ellington led the premier American big band, and through his compositions and performances he brought artistic credibility to African American jazz. Ellington played the piano, but his orchestra was his true instrument. 2 Classical Music Although best known for composing, leading and performing about 2,000 "big band" jazz pieces, Ellington also composed orchestral, chamber and solo piano works in the classical genre. His classical music has gradually gained new listeners in recent years due to recordings which are the focus of this Web page.

3 Early Years Young Edward began studying the piano at age seven. He was about 17 years old when he began playing piano professionally. By age 20 he was a bandleader, playing at social events. In 1922 Ellington moved to New York City, where he played with both theater orchestras and jazz bands. His first Broadway score was for a 1924 musical Chocolate Kiddies, a show which did not fare well. Also in 1924, Ellington became the leader of a six-member jazz band previously known as the Elmer Snowden Band. Within two years the Ellington Orchestra had eleven musicians in its ranks. 4 Cotton Club Africana Encyclopedia recounts Ellington's association with the Cotton Club in Harlem: In the fall of 1927 the Ellington orchestra secured a long-term gig at the Cotton Club, New York City's most prestigious nightclub, which was wired to permit "live" remote radio broadcasts that gave Ellington nationwide recognition. In keeping with the times, the Cotton Club was racially segregated. Only whites were admitted as patrons; all of the waiters and most of the entertainers were African American. During the engagement at the Cotton Club the band was called the Cotton Club Orchestra.

5 Style Ellington established the distinctive style of his orchestra with a series of recordings in 1927-28. The songs were timed to fit 78 r.p.m. records, which could only record about three minutes per side. The titles included Ellington's 1928 composition Black Beauty and became an enduring part of the orchestra's repertoire. The ensemble gained additional national publicity from its performance in the 1930 film Check and Double Check. Ellington's first longer recording was of his composition Creole Rhapsody. It was 8 1/2 minutes long and took up two sides of a 78 r.p.m. record. Africana Encyclopedia adds: In the mid-1930s Ellington wrote the score for a nine-minute musical film, Symphony in Black (1935), which featured a young Billie Holiday and foreshadowed Black, Brown, and Beige. Ellington and his orchestra toured the U.S. frequently during the 1930s and enjoyed success in Europe during tours there in 1933 and 1939.

In 1938 the orchestra took on Billy Strayhorn, who would be Ellington's closest collaborator for the next 30 years. 6 Carnegie Hall In 1943 Ellington and his orchestra performed at New York's legendary Carnegie Hall. The program included a ground-breaking 44-minute work entitled Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro. The work did not fit the conventions of either jazz or classical music, and the response of music critics was so disappointing that Ellington never again performed the entire piece in public. However, Africana Encyclopedia notes: Neither Ellington nor Strayhorn were dissuaded from creating other large-scale jazz suites, including the Liberian Suite (1947); Harlem (1951); the Festival Suite (1956); Such Sweet Thunder (1957), a musical tribute to Shakespeare; Suite Thursday ( 1960), which paid tribute to author John Steinbeck; and the Far East Suite (1966). Ellington also composed film scores for Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Paris Blues (1961).

7 Don Shirley Don Shirley is an African American pianist who was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1927 and died in 2013. He was best known for his jazz performances and recordings, but he was classically trained and had a noteworthy classical career. Duke Ellington heard him play at Basin Street in New York. In 1955 Don Shirley was piano soloist for music of Ellington at Carnegie Hall, in a concert of the Symphony of the Air. His obituary by Bruce Weber in The New York Times was Donald Shirley, a Pianist With His Own Genre, Dies at 86. It was published April 28, 2013: Still, he was close to many well-known jazz figures, including Duke Ellington, in whose honor he wrote ï¿½Divertimento for Duke by Don,ï¿½ a symphonic work that had its premiere in 1974, performed by the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra of Ontario. 8 Civil Rights Ellington participated in the Civil Rights movement from the 1940s on.

In 1941 he wrote the score for the musical Jump for Joy, a show intended to debunk common movie stereotypes of African American popular culture. During the Carnegie Hall premier of Black, Brown, and Beige he told the audience of society figures that people of all colors were backing the war effort to defend the red, white and blue. 9 Sacred Concerts Ellington began exploring spiritual themes with his Concert of Sacred Music in 1965. Africana Encyclopedia says of the work: In the Beginning, God, Ellington's opening movement, won a 1966 Grammy Award for best original jazz composition. In 1968 Ellington composed a Second Sacred Concert. At the time of his death he was preparing a third. Barbara Wright-Pryor was choral director for the November 1968 performance of Ellington's Sacred Concert at Chicago's Auditorium Theater. 10 John Coltrane During Ellington's final years he and the orchestra maintained a heavy schedule of one-night stands even as he recorded in small groupings with such jazz artists as Charles Mingus and Max Roach. One notable recording in 1962 was Duke Ellington and John Coltrane.

11 My People Barbara Wright-Pryor, President, Chicago Music Association, worked with Ellington twice and says of him: Duke composed My People for Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Celebration 'A Century of Negro Progress Exposition' and the elaborate production ran from August 16 to September 2, 1963 in the Arie Crown Theater at Chicago's McCormick Place. ... In 1963, Robert Morris was a young undergraduate music major at DePaul University's School of Music and a member of the Irving Bunton Singers. Duke appointed him arranger for all of the choral music for My People. ... My People was being performed in Chicago...when the historic March on Washington took place August 28, 1963 during which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the legendary "I Have a Dream" speech. 12 Revue Revived Ms.

Wright-Pryor recalled her involvement in the 1963 revival of the musical My People: In May, 1998, twenty-four years after his death, I was privileged to re-create, produce and restage his 1963 musical revue, My People, at Chicago's New Regal Theater with his granddaughter Mercedes Ellington as stage director and choreographer, and Dr. Robert L. Morris, founder/conductor the Leigh Morris Chorale of Minneapolis, MN, as choral director for the 16th International Duke Ellington Conference that was held in Chicago. 13 Final Years On the occasion of his 70th birthday party in 1969 he was given the Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon. In 1973 Ellington was diagnosed with lung cancer. Barbara Wright-Pryor says: During the final stages of his bout with lung cancer, Duke was hospitalized at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC and had a keyboard in his room on which he continued to compose and play daily until too ill to do so. Ellington passed away in New York City on May 24, 1974.

14 New World a-Comin' Ellington's New World a-Comin' (10:18) has been recorded by pianist Marco Fumo on the Italian music label Dynamic CDS 351 (2000) along with music by George Gershwin, James Price Johnson, Scott Joplin and William Grant Still. The liner notes give this description of the work: [O]ne of the most admired works by the mature Ellington, that of the great "suites". As a matter of fact, this work is more like a compact symphonic poem of literary inspiration, which Duke composed in 1943 and performed often and in various versions; for solo piano, with jazz orchestra or symphony orchestra. Every time, he played it in a slightly different way, ending up inserting it in his First Sacred Concerto, to which it contributed, as an English critic in the 1930s once said, its "prophetic breath". This work beautifully blends a noble inspiration and the graceful humour of everyday life. Pianist Willis Delony has also recorded New World a-Comin', on Centaur CRC 2468 (2000).

15 Detroit Symphony The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, led by Neeme Jï¿½rvi, Conductor, has recorded three of Ellington's works for symphony orchestra on CDs released by the British label Chandos. Harlem, Suite from "The River" and Solitude are found on Chandos 9909 (2001). Suite from "The River" also appears on an earlier disc, Chandos 9154 (1993). Harlem is also found on Chandos 9226 (1993). 16 The River Michael Fleming provides some background for Ellington's writing of Suite from "The River" in the liner notes of Chandos 9154: His son, Mercer Ellington, recalls that "the idea for The River had been kicking around for several years, ever since Stanley Dance had suggested an extended work depicting the natural course of a river". The elder Ellington composed the music for The River in 1970, during the same period of time when The New Orleans Suite was taking shape.

Michael Fleming tells us that when The River had its premier in 1971, Clive Barnes lauded it in The New York Times as: ...the most considerable piece from Mr. Ellington since his Black, Brown and Beige Suite. 17 Simon Rattle The website of quotes Simon Rattle discussing the concept of the CD Classic Duke Ellington: When I approached Luther about the project, I had little idea that I was, in fact, asking him to do what he and The Duke had discussed many years earlier but had never brought to fruition ï¿½ an orchestral setting of his work with jazz soloists where the orchestra was a living organic equal partner rather than a magnificent back-up. The beauty and power of the arrangements exceeded our wildest dreams. The roster of personnel reads: Simon Rattle, conductor; Lena Horne, vocals; Clark Terry, trumpet; Bobby Watson, alto sax; Joshua Redman, tenor sax; Joe Lovano, tenor sax; Regina Carter, violin; Geri Allen, piano; Lewis Nash, drums; Peter Washington, bass; City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Tracks include: Take The "A" Train, You're the one, Sophisticated Lady, Harlem, Isfahan, Ad lib on nippon, That doo-wah thing, Something to live for, Come Sunday, Solitude in Transblucency, Maybe and Things ain't what they used to be. 18 Symphonic Works Maurice Peress conducts the American Composers Orchestra on the CD Four Symphonic Works by Duke Ellington, Music Masters Jazz 7011 (1992). The program begins with Black, Brown and Beige Suite (20:09), comprised of Work Song, Come Sunday and Light. The second work is Three Black Kings (19:16), which includes King of the Magi, Solomon and Martin Luther King. Next comes New World a-Comin' (13:55), followed by Harlem, For Jazz Band and Orchestra (15:19).

Personnel are: Frank Wess, alto saxophone; Richard Chamberlain, trombone; Jimmy Heath, tenor and soprano saxophones; Roland Hanna, piano; Stephen Hart, clarinet; Jon Faddis, trumpet; Bill Easley, clarinet; Ron Carter, bass; and Butch Miles, drums. 19 Piano Four Hands Duo Campion-Vachon (the Campion-Vachon duo) is made up of two classical and jazz pianists from Quebec. Duke Ellington: Piano Four Hands is their recording on the Canadian label Analekta AN 2 9820 (2005). Analekta's website, , gives this description of the disc: Some thirty years after his death, Duke Ellington - pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader - remains one of jazz's most enduring legends. A great many of his works, like the ones on this recording arranged for piano four-hands, have become jazz standards, pieces that successive generations of jazz musicians assimilate and remake in their own image or interpret as faithfully as possible to the originals.

20 Queenie Pie The Chicago Opera Theater announced on May 17, 2013 that it would produce Duke Ellington's only opera, Queenie Pie: Interested in the opera genre since the 1940s, Ellington started composing Queenie Pie in 1962, when he received a commission from the New York public TV station WNET. In collaboration with librettist Betty McGettigan, he worked on the opera from 1967 to his death in 1974, but the work remained unfinished. ... COT performs the version that librettist McGettigan created for the Butler Opera Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009, proclaiming it to be the closest to Ellington's original vision. 21 Resources Duke Ellington ( ) - Official site maintained by CMG Music. Includes biography, photos and quotes by and about Ellington. Wikipedia ( ) - Wikipedia article with photographs, biographical and musicological details, OCG audio samples, and Internet references to related topics and people. Duke Ellington Panorama ( ) - Project of the Washington, D.C. Ellington Society.

List of compositions, sessions, information on joining other societies and Love You Madly, an e-mail discussion group, glossary, time line, centennial remembrances. Ellington on the Web ( ) - An extensive compilation of websites related to Duke Ellington and his Associates. The Duke Ellington Society ( ) - Official site. Includes biographical information plus appreciation, his interpreters, sound clips, information about the society, links. Schirmer.com ( ) - Biography, works, selected discography, articles, links.

Question: Give either of the forenames of Duke Ellington.
Answer: EDWARD KENNEDY